Friday, December 30, 2016

How to Create a Green & Pleasant Land

It can take a long time to create a green and pleasant land. In the case of Britain it took an ice age, an interstadial phase of global warming, a massive tsunami and around ten thousand years of human occupation.

In The Making of the British Landscape the geographer Nicholas Crane explores how the landscape of Britain has been shaped over the centuries by climate change and human occupation. This Esri Story Map uses a series of interactive maps to show how climate change and rising sea levels separated Britain from continental Europe.

As well as showing how Britain became an island this Story Map also examines how human occupation has shaped the British landscape, Centuries of deforestation, farming and urbanization have all contributed to the landscape of Britain. The construction of huge ritual monuments has also played a role in creating the British landscape that we know today.